My friend asked me to write down some of my political thoughts, so I am going to give it a try. This might wind up being a little bit disjointed, but here goes.  My basic problem with America is I don’t know why it has to be so mean.  We have a beautiful country with all this potential for helping people to have a happy and fulfilled life, but a small proportion of the country seems hell-bent on making everyone else work themselves to the bone to pay higher and higher rents and mortgages, and higher and higher prices for everything.  Perhaps economists can explain why everything just is constantly going up, up, up, in cost and never goes down---but from a common sense point of view, it all just seems to be about human greed.  These people and the companies they control just can’t ever get enough money.  Government enablers, and heads of business don’t seem to say, “well, do I really need all of this profit, all of this money?  Wouldn’t it be better to just make less money and give everybody else more of a break when it comes to affording things?”  I know this might seem naïve, but I really think that this is the starting point.

     Of course, we in America have a huge tradition of being incredibly greedy.  We basically took all of the Indians land, because some was just never quite enough, we killed all of their buffalo off to make lap-covers for people riding in carriages, we lied to the Indians about everything, imprisoned them, or just plain killed off most of them, all because it was our “manifest destiny” to do so, i.e. to take all of the land and its mineral wealth.  This is all totally well documented, and pretty much common knowledge by now.

     But coupled right alongside of all this like a Siamese twin, is this incredible American self-righteousness about everything.  This is what the Indians called the white man’s “forked tongue”.  Naturally the perfect religion for people like this is Christianity, because it’s major aspect is forgiveness.  With people basically hell-bent on being as greedy as possible (or “entrepreneurial” if you prefer), they really need a powerful mechanism for getting forgiven for lots of sins, and pretty quickly and efficiently to boot.   Christianity is just tailor-made for the big-time sinner.  (This is why most Americans don’t really understand why, for example, the Catholic Church has not been more forthright about policing it’s own priesthood.  The answer is that the Church’s primary interest does not align with the society at large, but rather with the ministering to the needs of the sinner.)

    People in America now—just regular people: the middle class, and working people-- are feeling the pinch, if you will, in ways that are similar to what happened to the Indians.  The difference is that now the people in power are turning on their own people, exploiting them to the max, causing them in many cases to lose their homes and livelihoods.  Of course, as it all continues and as the population booms, there are more and more people doing the exploiting and more and more victims.  The environment is the baby that goes down with the bathwater, along with a healthy food supply.  Big business has compromised all of our major natural resources to satiate their ever-expanding appetite for profits, and the ever-expanding demand for their products at the same time, because of the population boom.

      The problems in America today have reached a “critical” tipping point, because there are now large numbers of disenfranchised people who are getting very, very angry with the status quo.  The people in power, though sometimes being very nice, church-going people, don’t really feel compelled to change their entrepreneurial ways to just assuage a guilty conscience, if they possess such a “luxury”.   They just think, “that’s just the way the game is played in this capitalistic society” (i.e. if I wasn’t doing it, somebody else would be laughing all the way to the bank instead). 

      So how can things possibly change?  The government doesn’t want to change the system, because the government is controlled by the rich, and they don’t want to slit their own throats, or spring big leaks in their own pocketbooks.   The people from Occupy Wall Street seem to think that mass demonstrations will just intimidate the powers that be to develop a conscience.  Can a system that is essentially psychopathic in nature really spring a conscience?   How can this system really be changed?

     The essential challenge for the political Left is that there is no real way to change the current system unless a way can be found to change the thinking of at least half of the voting population on the Right who are basically enablers of the system as we now know it.  These people are staunch defenders of the current system as being the best one out there even if it is perhaps flawed.  For the progressive Left to honestly believe that they can “side-step” the influence of the Right, and somehow make an end-run around the system, but still change the system in dramatic and important ways, seems to be mostly wishful thinking.

     From where I sit--way out there in the middle of Left field—I think that the only way that things will change is if we (Lefties) become more like them (the Right), and if the Right becomes more like us, the Left.  I used to think that we on the Left should just ramp up on the “intimidation” factor so that the Right knows that we really mean business this time, and that we aren’t all just a bunch of wimps.  I was not advocating  violence but just the adopting of some of the Right’s pet penchants, like their penchant for owning fire arms, and their penchant for joining the National Rifle Association (the NRA) . It’s always been a pet idea of mine that the rebellion of the 60’s was ultimately killed through intimidation and violence culminating in the murder of nearly all its leaders, like the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, etc.  These many killings in so few years really demoralized a whole generation.   I used to think you could blame these killings on the “establishment”-- at least on right-wing thinking that somehow infected the minds of the perpetrators of these horrible murders.  But in all honesty, I have to tell you that it was my friend Wat Stearns (who owns and runs the very Left oriented T-shirt company called “Alternatees”) who convinced me that when all is said and done, non-violence is still the way to go, because no one really respects you if you are just a gun-toting asshole, plus I believe that you’ve ultimately got to dance with the devil in some way if you want to have any chance of changing him at all.

     If we did decide, however, to get a bunch of guns and join the NRA, (let’s just entertain it for fun), I think that the least the political Right could do for us is to start perhaps believing in the theory of evolution (this would require just taking a really good, long look in the mirror), and perhaps they could even start believing in all the overwhelming scientific data with regards global warming.  I don’t think that is really asking too much.  And these new positions on the Right could be adopted on a faith-based basis if need be; it is totally optional.   But really, it’s this anti-intellectual bent of the Right, this shooting-from-the-hip mentality that we find so annoying.  And is it really necessary to go around starting a war in a country like Iraq without knowing anything whatsoever about their culture or country beforehand?  Wouldn’t it be better to at least consult scholarly and scientific wings of one’s own profession—like for example, political scientists—before just going off half-cocked!

     I think it is fascinating how these days everyone is “blaming” the government for being dysfunctional and in a stalemate.  To me, it is quite obvious that the government just mirrors how the country is at large. These people in government, after all, are our elected representatives. It is the country itself which is dysfunctional and at a stalemate.  People on the Right and Left live in different geographical and psychological spaces.  They have no real appreciation for the others’ points of views, nor, to be perfectly honest, do they like each other very much.   It is almost as if the country needs mass psychotherapy, or mass town-hall meetings everywhere where people could discuss and face-off about their conflicting political opinions concerning where the country should be heading.  Perhaps people on the Left and Right should make more of an effort to actually live together, to dine together, to break bread and to crack the code that is keeping them apart. (Barney Frank has characterized the Left and Right as living in “parallel universes”). I think you get what I am trying to say.

       But, believe me, you are going to run into a lot of problems when you really start trying to communicate with “them”.   Here are just a few:

    You constantly hear the Right talking about the need to have just a “regular person” as a president, like a really smart and educated person just won’t do.  It is difficult to really make a “frontal attack” on these attitudes with logic.  The core beliefs of these people are often just that—belief based, as I said before.  Often the reasons for these beliefs are not understood at all by themselves or cannot be communicated.  Thus, many on the Left find them to be nearly “unreachable”.  Those on the right have very little tolerance for what they perceive to be naïve romanticism, idealism, or even “socialist” tendencies on the part of those on the Left.  In a dog-eat-dog world, they believe that Left leadership will leave America weak and vulnerable. The Left on the other hand, like I said before, would like more input in the government from science and from research and scholarly disciplines related to politics---like, for example, political science. You can just about track on your watch how long it will take for one or the other participant in a political conversation when there are these kinds of huge differences to span to walk off in exasperation.  Things have become so bad in America, that some bars actually discourage or in fact forbid political conversations, and I know for a fact that many families discourage it at get-togethers. 

     The reality is that we need way more discussion, but we need someone to teach us how to do it without getting upset--hence the analogy to “mass psychotherapy”.  It is as if we need referees or therapists to help us hang in there and not get too overwhelmed as we go through the process of reconciling some of our differences in point of view. Perhaps as the serious and staggering consequences for not having a meeting of the minds becomes even more apparent, people will get more serious about “compromise” in the public at large.

     There are some “little” things in America which have an incredibly destructive and disheartening influence, which could be fixed quite easily I believe.  These things help ruin our daily life and sense of independence as well as our national pride.  Some of them are as follows:  the renaming of important cultural centers like baseball stadiums.  Selling out the name of a stadium to a corporation approaches a “spiritual” breach for many people—it is down-right embarrassing and the height of insensitivity.  Similarly, is there some reason that a captive audience in a movie theatre should tolerate 45 minutes of brainwashing before the show starts?  This is just not right.  People should be standing up and booing en masse in these theatres (during the commercials, not the previews, please!)  Also, is it really necessary to share your cab with a TV screen right in your face spewing nonstop commercials and “entertainment”?   All of these things are just plain demoralizing and desensitizing.  They add to the hardening of our hearts and souls in our everyday life and help to make America mean.  They contribute to the embarrassing conclusion that Americans have just “sold out” their country. The perception of the American people that they are being treated as basically “white rats” in a maze is in fact accurate.  If you read advertising texts, you will see that they are basically just psychology texts using learning theory principles to develop better conditioning protocols aimed at their target species—you and me! 

     How does one reconcile the self-perception of Americans (even those on the political right) that they are good, honest people with the self-destructive, and psychopathic nature of many of their policies and actions?  Are they just deluded, unaware of the effects of their actions even though their motives are innocent and high-minded?   I believe that if one examines the history of the American psyche, one can find evidence of a kind of generalized--what I would call schizoid-like personality configuration.  You see this quite clearly in many politicians who almost seem to be speaking their own brand of double-talk.  They say one thing but mean something else, they say two contradictory messages at the same time, they constantly “spin” words and their meaning.   Historically, the American Indian saw this immediately---hence the white man’s “forked tongue!”   We have been at this a long time.  Perhaps less obvious is the emphasis one is constantly hearing in the media about how this or that particular action by someone in authority is “perceived” by the public, as if how one is “perceived” is of far more consequence than what one actually thinks or what one actually is.   Related to this is the quite American attitude of “making oneself over”, “reinventing oneself”, or “becoming one’s dream” etc.  One of our greatest industries now is entertainment whose bread and butter is “perception” and it’s manipulation.  We elect “actors” for presidents in this country.  In short there is a very definite American cultural bias toward having a very mutable sense of self, self-perception, and public perception.   All of these are in some measure a bit “schizoid”, though not all of them are necessarily destructive.  I am only trying to point out an American dynamic that is often overlooked or not understood.

       With regard to what we as Americans can do to change in the direction of self-preservation as a country and to make life in general here happier and more fulfilling, I think the time has definitely come for the realization that the “American people” have lost control of their country, including their government.  I believe that “regular people”-- meaning the middle and working class of Americans--now need their own “people’s lobby” in order to lobby Washington politicians for programs that are in their interest.  This is really an embarrassing state of affairs to realize that the American people need their own lobbying group in order to counter moneyed and corporate interest in their own government.   If a large group like MoveOn.org got involved, it would be quite easy, I believe, to have large numbers of Americans commit to a few dollars per month to pay for full-time lobbyists.   This idea seems like a “no brainer” to me, something long overdue.